Sardines

This hippo pool lies 50 yards from a dining area at the Serengeti National Park river camp where Terry Powers and his fiancee, Jennifer Rusin, spent eight days last fall. Powers, of Irvine, said the big neighbors were not that neighborly. "You'd go to the water's edge and they'd grunt and jostle, as if saying, 'You think you're gonna come in here?' " He used a Nikon N65 for the shot.

Warming ocean currents are bringing sardines back to Monterey Bay after decades of decline. Some scientists think global warming could be partly responsible for the burgeoning sardine population, although no one can say for sure whether warmer water is part of a natural cycle. "Global warming may make it so that we always have sardines in California," said oceanographer Jerrold Norton of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

It's early morning, and the clouds still hang over Newport Harbor. But already, it's rush hour in the water at Newport Bait Co. Sea lions exchange barks with Zuke and Kilo, the dogs that protect the bait barge from swooping, hungry gulls. The barge, as it always does during the warm months, bobs in the channel between the rock jetties at the harbor entrance. And as usual, the fishing boats line up, waiting for sardines, anchovies or mackerel. John Cunningham, part-owner of Newport Bait Co.

The night is overcast, obscuring the stars and turning the Pacific black and glassy as the Endurance works its way south from San Pedro. Half a mile away, the lights of Huntington Beach twinkle. Pretty as they are, it's another kind of light Vince Lauro is looking for. Lauro is skipper of the 57-foot fishing boat and, since this is fall, he's hunting for sardines.

Chanting to Allah, the fishermen of Qaitbey harbor slowly pull the long rope out of the water by hand, dragging in a net full of thousands of silvery sardines. It's the way fishermen here have worked for generations. Hauling in the net, suspended from a rope yards long, takes the two dozen men an hour. The work yields 45 pounds of sardines on a good day, and they will be able to sell the fish to housewives and others leaning over the quay wall for a total of about 100 Egyptian pounds, or $16.

As far as most Americans can tell, sardines spend their entire lives in those familiar rectangular tins. Congregating in their proper taxonomic groups--Sardina oliveoila, S. mustarda, S. tomatosaucum--they glide through pelagic waters in giant, sun-glinting schools, fearing only saw-toothed sharks and Japanese fishing boats with giant magnets. It must have been natural selection that finally eliminated those inefficient metal "keys." Not to denigrate the canned sardine.

Barefoot and dressed in an enveloping black burka, Fatima Dawood wades excitedly into the shallow waters of the Indian Ocean. She crouches and snatches at the silvery surf, hoping to grasp a few of the slippery fish twirling in the sand below. Her strategy pays off. She is soon fumbling with a handful of agitated sardines.

State health officials Friday warned people not to eat crabs, sardines, anchovies and bivalves such as clams and oysters caught for sport along the coastline of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Testing has revealed elevated levels in those species of a toxin called domoic acid, said Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Health Services.

It's 7 in the morning on a school day and a bus is pulling up to Christion Gagen's stop at Wilshire and Western, but he doesn't climb aboard. This one's too crowded. "By the time I pay," says the 15-year-old University High School student, "the seats would be gone." So he waits for another bus, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another.